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But how did this intruder find entrance?
It had a certain aptitude and it grasped at that to which it was
apt. In its nature it was capable of soul: but what is unfitted
to receive soul entire- present entire but not for it- takes what
share it may; such are the members of the animal and vegetal
order. Similarly, of a significant sound, some forms of being
take sound and significance together, others only the sound, the
blank impact.
A living thing comes into existence containing soul, present to
it from the Authentic, and by soul is inbound with Reality
entire; it possesses also a body; but this body is not a husk
having no part in soul, not a thing that earlier lay away in the
soulless; the body had its aptitude and by this draws near: now
it is not body merely, but living body. By this neighboring it is
enhanced with some impress of soul- not in the sense of a portion
of soul entering into it, but that it is warmed and lit by soul
entire: at once there is the ground of desire, pleasure, pain;
the body of the living form that has come to be was certainly no
unrelated thing.
The soul, sprung from the divine, lay self-enclosed at peace,
true to its own quality; but its neighbour, in uproar through
weakness, instable of its own nature and beaten upon from
without, cries, at first to itself and afterwards upon the living
total, spreading the disorder at large. Thus, at an assembly the
Elders may sit in tranquil meditation, but an unruly populace,
crying for food and casting up a host of grievances, will bring
the whole gathering into ugly turmoil; when this sort of people
hold their peace so that a word from a man of sense may reach
them, some passable order is restored and the baser part ceases
to prevail; otherwise the silence of the better allows the rabble
to rule, the distracted assembly unable to take the word from
above.
This is the evil of state and of council: and this is the evil of
man; man includes an inner rabble- pleasures, desires, fears- and
these become masters when the man, the manifold, gives them play.
But one that has reduced his rabble and gone back to the Man he
was, lives to that and is that Man again, so that what he allows
to the body is allowed as to something separate.
There is the man, too, that lives partly in the one allegiance
and partly in the other; he is a blend of the good that is
himself with the evil that is alien.
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